Cardiologist Friederike Keating, M.D., professor of medicine at the Larner College of Medicine, director of nuclear cardiology at University of Vermont Health, and chair of the American Society of Nuclear Cardiology Health Policy Committee, joined leading cardiovascular organizations urging lawmakers to back bipartisan legislation aimed at delaying a new Medicare payment cut they say would further erode already strained physician reimbursement rates and threaten patient access to care, according to Cardiovascular Business.
“There’s an interesting history to the efficiency adjustment. I think it’s many decades old,” Dr. Keating said, noting that it stems from a decades-old framework tied to the Medicare Economic Index. The adjustment, she explained, was developed alongside an inflationary component intended to account for rising practice costs. “On one side, the Medicare economic index was meant to kind of adjust in simple terms for inflation. And on the other side it was also supposed to adjust for things like increased efficiency.”
However, she noted that while hospitals have received inflationary updates over the years, physicians largely have not. “So it’s basically a negative adjustment for purported more efficient practices, but still we’re kind of missing the other side of that coin, the inflationary adjustment. So that doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to us,” Keating explained.
“The goal is preserving access to patients, access to doctors, access to technology,” she said. “The legislation is supposed to help keep us viable, at least, and keep us in a position that we can provide services to our patients. I think that’s the bottom line.”